Out of the Office

Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars.

In 1974, Robert Pirsig—a Korean War veteran, a philosopher, a former writing instructor, a survivor of shock treatment, and, by all accounts, a talented author of technical manuals—published “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.” It is a novel, but only barely (Pirsig didn’t bother to change the names of his friends), and it follows the narrator as he rides West with his young son, from Minneapolis to San Francisco. Readers hoping for advice about motorcycles, or about meditation, found something else entirely: picturesque anecdotes and ominous reveries, interrupted by dense seminars on the “self-defeating” nature of technophobia, the malignance of inferior workmanship, the “ugliness” of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics, and the importance of a quality called Quality. The book, gnomic but good-natured, eventually sold about five million copies, spurred on by some extraordinarily positive reviews. (Writing in this magazine, George Steiner compared it to “Moby-Dick.”) Pirsig attracted a cult of seekers eager to get past what he called “the primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars,” eager to explore the country’s back roads and byways—and eager to read his next book. They had a long wait, made longer, perhaps, by the murder, in 1979, of his son, Chris, the young rider from “Zen.” When “Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals” finally arrived, in 1991, it didn’t have nearly the same impact: it was more abstruse, it wasn’t a sequel, and it wasn’t even tangentially about motorcycles.

Thirty-five years later, a very different biker-philosopher has delivered a new indictment of “primary America.” Matthew B. Crawford is even more fanatical about motorcycle maintenance than Pirsig’s narrator. He’s never happier than when he’s rebuilding a master cylinder or dislodging a stuck oil seal, and his descriptions of the open road can seem slightly anticlimactic. For him, the journey is just the journey; the garage is the destination. Crawford has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (where Pirsig had been a grad student), a fellowship at the University of Virginia, and, most important, a scrappy motorcycle-repair shop in Richmond. His book is called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work” (Penguin; $25.95), and it’s intended as a challenge, a declaration of gearhead pride in an ever more gearless world.

Crawford’s book arrives just as a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the demands and rewards of the modern economy is coalescing into something like a movement. In 1998, the sociologist Richard Sennett published “The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism,” in which he saw soul-destroying consequences in our new work habits—endless hours spent at flexible jobs, performing abstract tasks on computer screens. Last year, in “The Craftsman” (Yale; $18), Sennett suggested that skilled labor could be a way to resist corporate mediocrity. The environmentalist writer Bill McKibben proposed something similar in “Deep Economy,” which condemned the ruinous effects of endless economic expansion and urged readers to live smaller, simpler, more local lives. This artisanal revival has been particularly pronounced among foodies, thanks in part to the writer Michael Pollan, who helped popularize an American variant of the Italian culinary-agrarian movement known as Slow Food. In “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food,” Pollan surveyed the excesses of the “industrial food chain” and paid thoughtful tribute to small farms and local produce. (You can see evidence of Pollan’s influence on the White House lawn, where Michelle Obama has planted an organic vegetable garden.) These ideas have crept farther toward the mainstream in the wake of the economic collapse, which inspired calls for a return to real work—a return, in other words, to activities more tangible (and, it was hoped, less perilous) than complex swaps of abstract financial products. Crawford means his book to be a philosophical manifesto for a dawning age: an ode to old-fashioned hard work, and an argument that localism can help cure our spiritual and economic woes. An excerpt appeared in the Times Magazine, where Pollan is a contributing writer, and it stayed near the top of the paper’s most e-mailed list for a week.

Crawford allows that his life has been “a bit unusual”: he spent much of his youth living in a nomadic commune on the West Coast. By the time he was fifteen, he had an apprenticeship in a Porsche repair shop, and soon he was retrofitting his aging Volkswagen Beetle with an engine designed to make it do all sorts of things that Volkswagen Beetles aren’t meant to do, like go fast. He studied physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, worked as an electrician, and then earned a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, although he found himself increasingly distracted by an ambitious motorcycle-rehabilitation project. After a few unhappy months at a Washington think tank, he quit to start his repair shop, Shockoe Moto, which is, these days, his most important credential. He writes about fixing motorcycles as an extension of philosophical investigation, a form of problem-solving that helps him understand Heidegger’s theory of skillful coping. He says, too, that fixing bikes has given him “a place in society,” as well as an “economically viable” job that won’t evaporate or get moved overseas. He more or less promises that if you get trained in skilled labor—as a mechanic, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter—you, too, can have all that. In his view, a cluster of cultural prejudices have steered many potential tradesmen into college, and then toward stultifying office jobs, which provide less satisfaction and less security than skilled manual labor, and sometimes less money.

For Crawford, the failure to appreciate skilled manual labor is a symptom of something even worse: a narcissistic refusal to grapple with the material world. He quotes a long scene from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in which the narrator has a frustrating encounter with careless mechanics who can’t be bothered to correctly diagnose his bike. Crawford’s stern verdict: this is “at once an ethical and a cognitive failure.” Such mechanics show, in their disregard for the motorcycle, how little they care about their profession, and, by extension, their fellow-citizens. Crawford says that big corporations—including, for instance, the ones that produce cheap motorcycle engines that aren’t worth fixing—tend to encourage this kind of anomie, by forcing workers to stick to mindless tasks or insipid scripts, thereby making it hard for them to take pride in their work. But Crawford is no Marxist. For him, the solution to big business is small business; he pits the work ethic and scrappy spirit of “small commercial enterprise” against the “softly despotic tendencies” of “outsized corporations.” His book takes up a variant of William F. Buckley’s old conservative rallying cry: it stands athwart capitalism, yelling, “Stop.”

It seems that every generation dis covers anew what Crawford has discovered: that work is—that we are—stupid and getting stupider. In “The Wealth of Nations,” which appeared in 1776, Adam Smith argued that while professional specialization broadened the economic activity of a society, it narrowed the lives of workers themselves. “Among nations of hunters, the lowest and rudest state of society, such as we find it among the native tribes of North America, every man is a warrior, as well as a hunter,” he wrote. By contrast, a worker with a dull, repetitive job would inevitably degenerate: “The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.” Crawford’s low-level data analysts are about as miserable as Smith’s “manufactory” drones, and for the same reason: they’re bored.

If boring labor is a threat to one’s humanity, it stands to reason that interesting labor can be a form of redemption. The Victorian sage John Ruskin helped invent the modern cult of the craftsman: he was both an idealist and an aesthete, and he argued that miserable workers produced miserable work, and vice versa. In “The Craftsman,” Sennett portrays Ruskin as a quirky and quixotic radical, sensitive to the intricate demands of great craftsmanship, and hopeful that the glories of Venetian architecture might help inspire workers to resist the ravages of “mechanical domination.” Yet the call to craft is in some ways a conservative call: it asks workers to seek fulfillment through personal diligence, not politics. In “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” which was published in 1849, Ruskin proposed a novel, if unlikely, antidote to revolutionary fervor: “There is a vast quantity of idle energy among European nations at this time, which ought to go into handicrafts.” He advocated not freedom from toil but freedom through toil, and he compared the demands of craftsmanship to the demands of God in the Anglican liturgy: the Master in “whose service is perfect freedom.” He opposed the noble ethic of service to “that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.”

But how do you serve craftsmanship without serving the market? How can an independent artisan insure that he doesn’t become an entrepreneur—and, in time, a corporate executive? This question haunts Crawford’s book, and it helps explain why he takes pains to present himself as merely an aspiring craftsman with “execrable” skills; a professional mechanic who still feels “like an amateur.” These disclaimers are meant to assure readers that, in a society afflicted by hyperspecialization, Crawford isn’t some technical wizard; he’s just a regular guy who happens to be handy with a seal puller. The idea is that we can become him, and that he won’t become someone else—he won’t build a bigger shop, hire more mechanics, expand into Maryland and then Delaware, create a lucrative line of Shockoe Moto leather jackets, and, finally, collaborate with BMW on a gleaming series of R69S replicas. He won’t, in other words, end up like Gene Kahn, the organic-farming pioneer who appears in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” as a vexed figure: Cascadian Farm, which he founded in 1971, has thrived and grown and joined the corporate food chain; Kahn is now the vice-president for sustainable development at General Mills.

Despite the years he spent in the commune, Crawford was devoutly anti-hippie as a teen-ager, and in “Shop Class as Soulcraft” he takes great pleasure in contravening liberal pieties. His book is filled with guys doing guy things, and women often figure as foils. He sneers at the “harpies” who once criticized him at a political-theory conference; he calls a faux-custom motorcycle a “Betty Crocker Cruiser”; and he mentions that Volkswagens “tend to get passed around like cheap whores.” In the introduction, he expresses the hope, however remote, that “women, no less than men, will recognize the appeal of tangible work that is straightforwardly useful.” But the book is, in large part, a treatise on the joys and frustrations of manliness in a post-manly age.

For Crawford, offices are profoundly feminized places. Reading a study about the sneaky ways in which managers assert their authority, he compares office life to “being part of a clique of girls,” with a brutal hierarchy hidden beneath “the forms and manners of sisterhood.” He singles out management-theory books for particular scorn, and he excoriates a (female) consultant whose corporate indoctrination sessions masquerade as touchy-feely exercises in self-realization. Far better, he says, to work at a garage or a construction site, where dirty jokes are not only tolerated but encouraged; where there are (as yet) no seminars on sexual harassment; where “one feels like a man, not a cog in a machine.” The modern workplace reflects our evolving views about gender—and, for Crawford, that might be part of the problem.

If “Shop Class as Soulcraft” is a book about male anxiety, it is also a book about American anxiety. It portrays a country under siege, beset on all sides by foreign workers who are willing to do everything more quickly and cheaply: there are motorcycle parts from Mexico, X-ray analyses from India, service manuals written by “some hapless Japanese student of English as a Second Language.” (When people in America say that certain jobs are “disappearing,” they usually mean that non-Americans are now doing them. Skeptical readers can savor the irony that Shockoe Moto specializes in imports.) Crawford implies that by embracing skilled labor America can help reverse this trend, although the logic isn’t quite clear: if the demand for mechanics is basically inelastic, how can it offset other trends? Crawford allows himself some nostalgia for the days when financial transactions were conducted face to face, and when bankers judged someone’s creditworthiness by asking around “at the grocery and the hardware store”—after all, everyone was local. An antipathy, however mild, to foreignness is indispensable to the creed of localism, which seeks to make our economic worlds more intelligible by shrinking them. When Pollan visited some of the industrial-scale organic farms that Gene Kahn works with, the first surprise was the workers: he confessed that he hadn’t expected to see “migrant labor crews” on an organic farm.

In this decade, the revival of traditional craftsmanship and homegrown food has generally been seen as a progressive cause, loosely aligned with environmentalism, blue-state snobbery, and all-purpose anti-corporate activism. But “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was a hit partly because it pushed back against lefty idealism. “Everyone’s just about out of gumption,” Pirsig’s narrator says. “And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource—individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right.” Crawford himself has cultivated alliances with conservative institutions. He once received funding from the right-leaning John M. Olin Foundation (he admits to spending its research grant on an air compressor), and the think tank where he worked, which goes unnamed in the book, was the George C. Marshall Institute, which advances a skeptical view of the environmental movement. (He was the executive director, and says that his job consisted of “coming up with the best arguments money could buy.”) He recently delivered a lecture based on the book at the offices of the Heritage Foundation, and his Times Magazine essay earned an enthusiastic endorsement from the Web site of National Review. Although Crawford avoids overt political advocacy, he lays out his ideological program in a sharply worded paragraph near the end of the book:

It is now the capitalist who says, “Workers of the world, unite!,” the better to dissolve those “inefficiencies” in the labor market (that is, high wages) that arise from political boundaries. The slogan once expressed a hope to organize a body of workers who were dispersed and hence exploitable, whereas now it captures the desire for a mass of “human resources,” exploitable because undifferentiated. This latter intention is accompanied by all the easy moral prestige of multiculturalism, so it finds its champions on the erstwhile Left. Those at the top of the food chain get a new identity in which to take pride, that of the sushi-eating, Brazilian-girlfriend-having cosmopolitan.

Crawford seems to yearn for a rethinking of left and right, as they’re now configured. Agrarianism, like environmentalism, hasn’t always been considered a progressive cause, and there’s nothing inherently liberal about artisanal cheese, or artisanal bikes—and, just as important, nothing inherently conservative about multinational corporations. Rod Dreher, a National Review contributor and the author of “Crunchy Cons,” is ardently pro-organic and ardently anti-gay marriage. Victor Davis Hanson, the author of “Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea,” is also the author of “Mexifornia,” about the dangers posed by immigration. And one of the heroes of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” describes himself as a “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmental-lunatic farmer.” Part of the appeal of the localist-artisanal creed, for certain liberals and conservatives alike, is precisely that it’s anti-cosmopolitan, anti-corporate, anti-progress—an alternative to the creative destruction of capitalism. It tugs against the shared assumptions of most Democrats and Republicans: that America’s future is bright; that change is good.

Proponents of homegrown food and “(very) small business”—which is how Crawford describes his shop—sometimes talk about how artisanalism improves the lives of workers. But the genius of this loosely organized movement is that it’s not a labor movement; it’s a consumer movement. Pollan writes about the Italian Slow Foodists who realized that “even connoisseurship can have a politics,” and he voices his own hope that “an eater in closer touch with his senses will find less pleasure in a box of Chicken McNuggets than in a pastured chicken or a rare breed of pig.” In fact, pleasure isn’t merely the motivating force in Pollan’s books; it’s the goal. His chief criticism of Chicken McNuggets is that they are insufficiently delicious. (Has he tried them with the hot-mustard sauce?) He is both a gourmand and an idealist, which means that he tastes the entire food economy each time he has a meal. When he saw those migrant laborers, maybe he was thinking about their wages—but he was also thinking about his supper.

Crawford promises more than good taste; his book sets its sights on the blue-collar worker, not on the fussy consumer. And so he writes dutifully about economic trends, changing labor markets, and the uncertain future of America’s information economy. But he can’t feign much enthusiasm for, say, jobs in the health-care sector, no matter how satisfying or useful or plentiful those jobs might be. Really, he likes engines and building things and fixing things; his dedication to his shop is rooted in his admiration for his clients and for what he calls the “kingly sport” of motorcycle riding. In other words, his work is “useful” only insofar as it enables men to ride motorcycles—an activity that might fairly be described as useless. Crawford may have set out to write a book about work, but the book he actually wrote is about consumption. No less than Pollan, he is a connoisseur, exercised more by shoddy workmanship than by shoddy working conditions.

In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” the narrator sees motorcycles as a noble alternative to the constraining influence of cars: “Because you’re used to it, you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV.” Similarly, agrarians have long contrasted the rude vitality of farm life with the enervating effects of life in an office, or in a factory. Crawford’s distaste for office work can make any alternative seem preferable, and he comes close to idealizing life among the gears and gaskets, lauding the admirable simplicity of “the relationship between a machinist and his shop boss.” This nostalgic tribute is, of course, proof positive that hard jobs get much easier to love as soon as they start to disappear. If Crawford is correct about the decline of America’s information economy, we should brace ourselves for a series of mournful, indignant books that eulogize the modern office—a highly networked, quasi-social, semi-autonomous refuge, where turn-of-the-century workers spent their pleasant days solving problems, exploring the limits of coöperation, and wasting valuable company time on the Internet.

In fact, such a book exists already. Alain de Botton shares Crawford’s enthusiasm for skilled labor, but for him it’s a much more flexible category. In “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” (Pantheon; $26), de Botton conducts a charming and unapologetically scattershot tour of global capitalism. He is a first-rate guide, inquisitive and faintly lecherous—at one point, he becomes transfixed by the “knee-length grey woollen shorts” of an administrative assistant named Katie—and, in place of outrage or disgust, he offers finely tuned irony. Like many critics of the current economic order, de Botton notes that as consumers we are “as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them.” But he’s no localist; he merely observes, with ambivalence and resignation, that this process has denied us “myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.” (It seems apt that the book is available in a signed, limited-edition printing from the British luxury-travel magazine Monocle, for ninety dollars; it comes packaged in a “tactile linen cover that will wear gently with use and age.”) When Pollan described his visit to a high-tech breakfast-cereal laboratory in Minneapolis, he scarcely bothered to conceal his disapproval. And, when de Botton tours a biscuit factory in Belgium, he starts with mockery: “Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles.” Then he thinks better of it and decides that, with a little imagination, it is possible to see the biscuit factory as an ennobling place:

The manufacture and promotion of all these [products] was no game, but rather an attempt to subsist which was no less grave, and therefore no less worthy of respect and dignity, than a boar hunt on whose successful conclusion the fate of an entire primitive community might once have hung. For if a new wrapping machine did not operate as efficiently as anticipated, or if a slogan failed to capture the imagination of shoppers, there would be no escape from shuttered houses and despair in the suburbs of nearby Verviers. The biscuits carried lives on their backs.

Crawford’s brief for skilled manual labor is rooted in firsthand experience: repairing motorcycles fills him with a “sense of agency and competence.” But what would he say to the accountants in de Botton’s book, who express “earnest pride in their mastery of a labyrinthine craft”? Crawford decries our “ignorance of the world of artifacts,” and mourns “the disappearance of tools from our common education.” But he never quite gets around to explaining what counts as a tool, and why. The new-economy theorist Richard Florida once praised the innovative practices of Best Buy, the electronics retailer, by noting that, after a sales associate made a small but effective improvement to a display rack, the corporation implemented the change nationwide. Crawford finds the whole thing risible, but why shouldn’t a retail display rack count as a tool, in Crawford’s sense of the word? It’s a physical device meant to perform a particular function, and the shop’s cash registers generate a fairly accurate record of how well it succeeds.

For that matter, it’s not clear why physical objects should have some special claim to toolness. In “The Craftsman,” Sennett writes about open-source software projects like Linux as expressions of modern craftsmanship. But, then, Sennett, whom Crawford cites, isn’t really an information-age refusenik. In fact, some business executives read his book to learn how to persuade their staff to be more craftsmanlike—that is, to be more valuable employees. On the back cover, there is a blurb from James H. Dulebohn, a professor whose specialties include strategic human-resources management. And Sennett writes admiringly of William Edwards Deming, the twentieth-century business guru who encouraged companies to embrace a program that Pirsig’s narrator might recognize: total quality management. On Amazon.com, the top-ranked customer review calls Sennett’s book “a worthwhile read for managers, for H.R. people, for craftspeople of all stripes.”

Crawford needn’t be jealous, though. With a minimum of tweaking, he could turn “Shop Class as Soulcraft” into a first-rate motivational speech for business groups nationwide. (Though he may want to omit any similes involving Volkswagens.) His encomium to “tangible work that is straightforwardly useful” could easily be taken as a general exhortation to excellence. In extolling “mindful labor,” he captures precisely the quality that most managers would like to reinforce in the workers they supervise. And when he writes about the importance of “seeing clearly, or unselfishly,” and “the experience of being fully engaged in what you are doing,” he sounds like one of those business consultants he despises, delivering a message that is all the more effective because it comes covered in a sweet glaze of anti-corporate rabble-rousing. Crawford wants his readers to become better, happier, more productive workers. Who could argue with that? ♦